Beyond a Court of Law: Holocaust Film and the Tensions in Primo Levi’s ‘Grey Zone’

I. ‘Privileged’ Victims on Trial: Levi’s ‘Grey Zone’ and the Problem of Judgement

Many aspects of Jewish behaviour during the Holocaust, and the post-war response it attracted, have not always been foregrounded in the memorialisation of the event. Even before the end of World War II, a number of Jewish Kapos (who were typically chiefs or supervisors of slave labour squads), were murdered immediately after liberation by fellow survivors or executed by Soviet forces. ⁹ Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, around 40 divisive legal trials took place in Israel following the discovery and arrest of alleged ‘collaborators’ who had survived the Nazi camps. These were known as the ‘Kapo Trials’, which have attracted considerable research and a growing consensus that the trials were overwhelmingly problematic and born more out of a desire for revenge than justice. Idith Zertal, for instance, draws explicitly on Levi’s ‘grey zone’ in her argument that these trials were ‘purges’ motivated by political agendas and aimed at ‘the lowly and the trivial’. ¹⁰ A newspaper at the time had even called for ‘collaborators’ to be ‘liquidated’. ¹¹ Of those trials where a guilty verdict was handed down (there were also a number of acquittals), defendants were either given light prison sentences or, in one case, an initial death penalty was later commuted to incarceration for a period of 10 years. Similarly, the much-criticised Dutch authority called the ‘Jewish Court of Honour’ examined the cases of 23 ‘privileged’ Jews, two of whom had themselves asked to be investigated. The ‘trial’ of two Judenrat (Jewish council) officials eventually broke down and resulted in what amounted to a ‘moral censure’. ¹²

The vexed nature of navigating the complex issue of victim complicity in a legal setting in no small part hinges on the ways in which survivor narratives are played out and regulated in a court of law. The treatment of Georg Goessl, a (non-Jewish) former Kapo in Mauthausen, reveals the chasm between testifying to the extremities of the concentration camps and the implications of transmitting this within the proceedings of a court of law. During his trial, as Goessl was describing a series of events in the face of serious allegations of complicity in the deaths of 47 prisoners, he was interrupted by the prosecution’s objection that ‘to let him run on in narrative form is grossly improper.. . . Counsel is required to ask questions that elicit matters that are material and relevant’. ¹³ Goessl’s defence counsel countered that defendants ‘are literally talking for their own lives. They must defend themselves, and the only way they can do it is to best explain what did transpire in their minds and what circumstances they were surrounded by’. ¹⁴ In this case, the kind of testimony that would some years later become a highly valued primary source and artefact of historical knowledge was deemed to have no place in the courtroom. The presiding judge announced that the objection was sustained and that Goessl’s defence counsellor was required to ‘ask questions to bring out probative information and will not permit their witness to ramble on’. Despite what Joshua Green considers to be vague allegations and doubtful evidence, Goessl was pronounced guilty at the end of the trial and sentenced to hang. ¹⁵

Perhaps the most well-known controversy relating to Jewish behaviour in a legal context is Hannah Arendt’s criticisms of Jewish council leaders stemming from the Israeli trial in 1961 of Nazi-German perpetrator Adolf Eichmann. At one point during this trial, which I will return to in more detail in my analysis of the film Hannah Arendt, the testimony of a member of Hungary’s Judenrat was interrupted by loud cries from onlookers watching the proceedings. ¹⁶ Arendt’s later analysis of the trial, which condemned the actions of Jewish leaders, caused considerable uproar among Jewish communities. Another trial that has garnered increased attention in recent years is the libel case involving Rudolf Kastner, who had been the principal Jewish leader in Hungary during the deportation of half a million victims to Auschwitz late in 1944. Kastner was heavily criticised for the assistance he provided to Eichmann and for not taking heed of, and warning others about, reports of mass killings. At the same time, Kastner has also been praised for organising the safe transportation of more than 1500 Jews to Switzerland on the ‘Kastner Train’. ¹⁷ When Kastner sued Malchiel Gruenwald in 1955 for libel due to inflammatory remarks on his actions, the presiding judge concluded that Kastner had knowingly ‘collaborated’ with the Nazis and ‘sold his soul to the devil’. Nonetheless, subsequent calls to try Kastner as a ‘collaborator’ fell through and his name was cleared by appeal in 1958, just after he was murdered. While the reasons behind Kastner’s assassination remain unclear, Asher Maoz contends that it was probably Judge Halevy’s demonising remarks, ‘more than anything else, that led to the attack on Kastner and his fatal injuries two years after the delivery of the judgment’. ¹⁸ These examples of judgements being passed within, or associated with, legal contexts regarding victims’ perceived betrayal of their fellow Jews exemplify the murkiness of the line between prosecution and persecution in the context of Levi’s ‘grey zone’.

The legacy of the Kastner trial alone has given rise to a stage play, television miniseries, two novels and a documentary film, raising the question of what potentialities different media entail when representing the liminal figures of the ‘grey zone’. Levi himself gave special attention to the issue of cultural representation in his essay, and particularly in relation to filmic portrayals of ‘compromised’ victims. Levi writes in ‘The Grey Zone’ that:

From many signs, it would seem the time has come to explore the space which separates. . . the victims from their persecutors, and to do so with a lighter hand, and with a less turbid spirit than has been done, for instance, in a number of films. ¹⁹

Levi’s scepticism of what would later become known as the ‘Hollywoodization’ of the Holocaust was present in several of his writings. Indeed, the impact that cultural products have had, and continue to have, on understandings of moral ambiguity and compromise occupied Levi for much of his life. Levi singles out popular histories, the history taught in schools and films as particularly predisposed to the simplifying trend he identifies – the ‘Manichean tendency which shuns half-tints and complexities’, and resorts to the black-and-white binary opposition(s) of ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’, ‘good’ and ‘evil’. ²⁰ Nonetheless, setting aside Levi’s doubtfulness towards film, his reflexive ethical uncertainty and multi-faceted evocation of the problems of judgement and representation in relation to ‘privileged’ Jews provide an essential framework through which to contemplate their representation on the screen.

Writing of the heavily criticised Chaim Rumkowski of the Lodz Ghetto, Levi’s own difficulty in relating ethically fraught experiences and behaviours in the impossible scenarios created by the Nazis is clear. Rumkowski had been the head of the Jewish Council in the longest-surviving ghetto and has been roundly accused of betraying Lodz’s Jewish population by carrying out Nazi edicts in what has been perceived to be a more zealous manner than many other Judenrat officials. A man with seemingly authoritarian inclinations, judgements of Rumkowski pervade survivor testimony. Abraham Biderman labels him a ‘medieval despot’, though later in his memoir expresses some reluctance at offering a final verdict: ‘I leave it for history to judge’. ²¹ Levi’s reflection on Rumkowski displays a similar ambivalence. On the one hand, he positions Rumkowski as a self-proclaimed ‘King of the Jews’ who was intoxicated with power ‘not because of, but rather despite, the ghetto environment’. ²² On the other hand, Levi contends that Rumkowski should not be judged. He writes that just as ‘our need and ability to judge falters’ when confronted with the desperate situation of the Jewish Sonderkommandos (special squads) forced to work in the death camp crematoria, a similar ‘impotentia judicandi’ ‘paralyses’ us when considering Rumkowski’s behaviour. In short, when considering ‘privileged’ victims – most of whom (including Rumkowski and most crematorium workers) did not survive to tell their stories – moral judgement should be withheld. In extreme situations where notions of choice and agency are stripped of their conventional meanings, neither negative nor positive judgements should, according to Levi, be passed on these tortured figures. Yet this gives rise to a paradox of judgement, as the value-laden nature of language itself means that even if judgement in these cases is inappropriate, it is also inevitable. This paradox of judgement is evident not only in Levi’s writings, but also within films that self-consciously question the applicability of a moral-legal paradigm to victim behaviour in extremis.

II. Defendants, Witnesses and Judges: The ‘Grey Zone’ in Documentary

Thousands of documentary films have been released over the decades, with more appearing each year. Ranging from Claude Lanzmann’s massively influential nine-and-a-half hour Shoah (1985) to the comparatively limited release of localised documentaries produced by Holocaust museums around the world, the genre is unquestionably diverse. The vast majority of productions arguably belong to what seminal documentary theorist Bill Nicols classifies as an ‘expository’ mode of address. ²³ The frequent reliance on archive material within this category has proven fertile ground for critics of Holocaust documentary in particular, not least of all due to the origin of much of the wartime photographs and footage deployed in films being taken from – and not always textualized as – Nazi propaganda. ²⁴ In contrast to more ‘interactive’ and ‘reflexive’ modes of documentary (such as in Shoah), the expository or ‘classic’ form is defined by its prioritisation of ‘the logic of the argument’ being conveyed by a given film’s narrative, which is typically of a more didactic nature and marked by conventional documentary techniques. ²⁵ Nichols even suggests that expository documentary films are defined by a ‘moralizing quality’ ²⁶ – something that has clear implications for the present discussion of judgements of those within Levi’s ‘grey zone’.

There have also been a number of Holocaust documentaries that address the ethical dilemmas of ‘privileged’ Jews – ghetto leaders in particular – including Josh Waletzky’s Partisans of Vilna (1986), Kathryn Taverna and Alan Adelson’s Lodz Ghetto (1989), Dariusz Jablonski’s Fotoamator (Photographer, 1998), Claude Lanzmann’s Le dernier des injustes (The Last of the Unjust, 2013), among others. Nonetheless, these films seldom take the issues of moral ‘complicity’ and ‘compromise’ at issue here as their central point of focus and invariably overlook the complexity of the issues involved. ²⁷ The transmission of judgement through the camera’s gaze through an expository mode of documentary filmmaking in particular serves to reinforce the importance of reflecting on the problems that Levi highlights, exemplified in Tor Ben-Mayor’s film Kapo.

Released in 1999, Ben-Mayor’s Kapo neatly fits into Nicols’ category of ‘expository documentary’. The film serves as a valuable exemplar of one kind of representation of ‘privileged’ Jews not only because its narrative focuses so centrally on the issues of moral ambiguity and compromise articulated by Levi – perhaps more so than any other documentary film – but also because its thematic and stylistic elements signify a complicated simultaneous embrace of, and resistance to, the validity of a moral-legal discourse. Like so many other Holocaust documentaries of its kind, Kapo is replete with the use of historical archive footage, eyewitness video testimony, an emotive musical score and a narrator’s authoritative voiceover. The film elides the historical specificity of the term ‘Kapo’ by collapsing into it prisoners who held a variety of different ‘privileged’ positions within the distinct settings, from members of the Ordnungsdienst (Order Service or Jewish police) who helped carry out Nazi edicts in the ghettos, to the Blockälteste (Block Elders) who were responsible for barracks in the concentration camps. Through a variety of strategies, judgements ranging from condemnation to absolution are dealt out by the filmmaker on the survivor subjects whose experiences are explored in a wide-ranging narrative.

The film begins by foregrounding the aforementioned ‘Kapo Trials’, which are portrayed as constituting a volatile part of Israel’s post-war environment. A brief introductory sequence consisting of intimidating drumbeats, staged footage from inside a moving train, and panning shots over archive images of emaciated prisoners give way to a summary of the Eichmann trial, which received global attention, and the ‘numerous other [Kapo] trials taking place far from the public eye’. ²⁸ The film proceeds to examine a number of examples of former ‘privileged’ Jews in the ghettos and camps, many of whom participate in the documentary by recalling their experiences on camera. The very structure of the film serves as a framing device for judgement. On several occasions, the camera pans over images of multiple court transcript documents, which dissolve into each other amidst the overlapping voiceover of actors, who read out passages that speak of acts of violence committed by victims who were slightly higher on the camp hierarchy than their vulnerable underlings. This becomes a familiar refrain, connoting the considerable scope of this type of behaviour and, at least within these sequences, leaving the validity of legal judgement in the cases unchallenged.

People who appear on screen throughout Kapo are implicitly positioned as ‘defendants’, ‘witnesses’, ‘expert authorities’ and, in one instance, a literal judge. Thus, the use of heavily edited extracts from contemporary interviews filmed in Germany, Poland, Israel and Australia form fragments of what metaphorically becomes a collective trial of different ‘privileged’ personas who survived through morally ambiguous means. Significantly, Brian Winston contends in his discussion of documentary film that a ‘legal framework is too loose to compel or even much encourage ethical practice in documentary film-making’. ²⁹ Kapo’s multi-layered reliance on the legal trials in a structural and aesthetic sense underlines this potential problem. Several facets of the film’s mode of representation rely on and replicate legal processes and discourses, which pass clear judgements on their ‘privileged’ subjects. Nonetheless, Kapo does contain some – notably brief – questioning of the applicability of moral and legal judgement in this context.

The inclusion in the film of retired Supreme Court Judge Haim Cohen is particularly significant. Cohen briefly appears on camera towards the end of Kapo to contemplate his personal experiences while presiding over some of the trials of alleged Jewish ‘collaborators’. In what might be viewed as the film’s most reflexive moment in terms of its engagement with the problem of judgement, Cohen states:

I could not escape the feeling that we are not at all able to judge these people, or even to put ourselves in their shoes, as one must do to judge someone. If a person acts under the threat of death to himself or his children, solidarity with others doesn’t come into the equation. His solidarity is first of all to himself and his children. It’s not only natural but also moral and permissible. I had sleepless nights for over a year. I sometimes felt . . . great pity for the person I had to judge and accuse. But sometimes I was also disgusted. ³⁰

The placement of this scene is pivotal. The narrative to this point has catalogued numerous problematic actions on the part of ‘privileged’ prisoners, made clear the traumatic impact these have had on other victims, and on several occasions portrayed former ‘privileged’ prisoners as untrustworthy interviewees. And yet Cohen, a man charged with determining the legal responsibility of these figures, speaks of an ethical dilemma of his own that caused him considerable and sustained discomfort to the point of sleeplessness. Cohen describes and supports the justification for choosing oneself and one’s loved ones over ‘solidarity’ with strangers, a ‘choice’ that survivor testimony has made clear was forced on many Holocaust victims – and not only those who obtained ‘privileged’ positions. At the same time, Cohen reveals again the paradox of judgement that Levi evoked in his writing on the ‘grey zone’, identifying those before him in the courtroom as deserving of pity, while also finding himself repulsed by the accused.

Cohen’s acknowledgement of the impossibility of empathising with the circumstances of ‘privileged’ prisoners gestures to an important ethical question that applies to not only the filmmakers of Kapo, but all those who seek to represent the ‘choiceless choices’ of those forced into the ‘grey zone’. Ben-Mayor’s strategies mean this question is particularly crucial in relation to Kapo given the form that it takes and its thematic focus on ‘privileged’ Jews. The inclusion of Cohen’s reflection on the personal difficulties he faced in coming to terms with the issue is therefore highly significant. Yet the judge’s ambivalent verdict on judgement and those who should-not-be-but-must-be judged is surrounded by a plethora of evidence that the compromised victims in Kapo are subject to a constant process of moral evaluation. Through the employment of authoritative voiceover narration, positioning of survivor testimony, manipulation of historical artefacts, and at times deceptive editing of interviewee comments, the film essentially places survivors of the ‘grey zone’, all of whom received no legal punishment for their wartime behaviour, on trial yet again.

Nicholls highlights that the expository mode of documentary filmmaking ‘raises ethical issues of voice: of how the text speaks objectively and persuasively (or as an instrument of propaganda)’. He asks: ‘What does speaking for or on behalf of someone or something entail in terms of a dual responsibility to the subject of the film and to the audience whose agreement is sought?’ ³¹ This dilemma is even more pronounced in the context of representing victims of genocide by proxy. Levi himself found the necessity of speaking on behalf of those who did not survive – those whom he called the ‘drowned’ – extremely distressing, and was equally if not more uncomfortable when his writing was met with negative reactions by those he wrote about who were still living. ³² While a number of former ‘privileged’ prisoners do appear on screen in Kapo to speak about their own perceptions and actions during the war, ‘privileged’ prisoners are in many ways ‘spoken for’ and judged in a manner that arguably overwhelms any sympathy or ambivalence conjured through their individual appearances. This complex dynamic of people standing in to speak for, and pronounce judgement on, ‘privileged’ prisoners is particularly clear in the film’s examination of Zvi Hanek Barenblat.

Barenblat was a Polish Jew who became chief of the Jewish police when the Nazis created the Bedzin Ghetto. After the war, Barenblat was convicted for collaboration by a Tel Aviv District Court, but the Israeli Supreme Court subsequently overturned this decision. ³³ Through a prominent musical score that evokes both suspense and horror, one early sequence represents Barenblat’s denunciation, arrest, and trial in Israel as a dramatic series of events. Reuban Vaxelmann, also a survivor of the Bedzin Ghetto and Barenblat’s sole accuser in Kapo, had testified at Barenblat’s trial and is consequently used by the filmmaker as a ‘witness’. The inclusion and framing of Vaxelmann using an almost legalistic discourse imply judgement in and of itself, cemented in Vaxelmann’s unqualified declaration: ‘The policemen and the different collaborators had fantastic conditions. They had unlimited food and no restrictions on their movements’. The filmmaker’s misleading use of archival footage in passing judgement on Barenblat is evident when a film fragment is included of a member of the Jewish police strolling past two naked corpses in a street. The images used are taken from a Nazi propaganda film of the Warsaw Ghetto; thus Kapo imposes the perpetrators’ perspective – and judgement – of Jewish victims onto the viewer. Further, the lengthy build-up of the narrator and Vaxelmann’s alternating descriptions of Barenblat’s discovery and arrest in Israel severely dilute the narrator’s belated admission that the Nazis had randomly appointed all members of the local orchestra, of which Barenblat was the conductor, to be Jewish police. The effect of this revelation, which might be construed as a significant factor in tempering any judgement of him, is arguably lost due to the shock effects produced by the film’s editing and soundtrack preceding it.

Perhaps most significantly, while Barenblat’s initial guilty verdict and 5-year sentence were later reversed, Kapo pronounces what equates to the strongest negative judgement of all its ‘privileged’ subjects on the former chief of the Bedzin’s Jewish police due to the fact he refuses to take part in the film. In the ‘summative’ conclusion of the documentary, the filmmakers go in search of Barenblat, who has remarried and moved to Germany. Footage is shown from a moving car that seems to be seeking him out, while the narrator declares: ‘To this day, Barenblat refuses to make any reference to his past. He leads a quiet life and asked not to be interviewed for this film’. ³⁴ Just as this sentence begins, the camera zooms in on a building window, revealing the back of an old man reading a newspaper. The invasive shot of this figure, presumably Barenblat, implies that this ‘privileged’ Jew has an obligation to testify, and he has failed to fulfil this. As he is not willing to subject himself to the scrutiny of the camera, Barenblat is subjected to moral condemnation. While the notion of survivors being morally obligated to bear witness – especially by those far removed from the events in question – might seem problematic enough, it is also worth noting that being compelled to testify has evident legal connotations also.

Even those survivors formerly holding ‘privileged’ positions who do testify in Kapo are frequently treated in a problematic manner. To take one further example, soon after the above judgement of Barenblat, Vera Alexander is shown tending her garden at her home in Israel. A change in the musical score to a lighter melody signals a shift in tone to greet the survivor’s willingness to testify on film and attempt to justify her behaviour, though negative judgement remains in the editing of the scene. A former prisoner-functionary who was responsible for a prisoner barrack in the Women’s Camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Alexander’s testimony is contextualised by the sombre narrator’s ironic observation that she, despite never being tried for her wartime behaviour, ‘does not see a moral problem in the fact that she held a position in the camps’. The composition of the next shot strongly implies that there is a moral problem. In the next frame, a visibly annoyed Alexander is shown sitting in her house, exclaiming to the interviewer: ‘No, it wasn’t the power. I don’t know. Today I don’t know what it is. This passion to live. To live’. After Alexander stresses the last phrase, the camera lingers on her while she calmly smokes a cigarette. This scene illustrates the crucial importance of the filmmakers’ off-screen questions being left out of the final cut – a common element of expository documentary filmmaking. From Alexander’s attitude towards the unseen interviewer and the initial words she uses to attempt to explain her motivation – ‘No, it wasn’t the power’ – it is evident that the interviewer has asked the survivor a particularly loaded question to obtain this response.

The interviewer–interviewee dynamic and power relation in Kapo reflects documentary scholar Keith Beattie’s conceptualisation of the interview’s predisposition to judgement as residing on a spectrum between ‘conversation’ and ‘interrogation’. ³⁵ If expository documentary, as Nichols suggests, ‘emphasizes the impression of objectivity and of well-substantiated judgment’, ³⁶ the mode of representation in Kapo fulfils this by reinforcing the validity of a moral-legal paradigm, containing only a few fleeting moments that gesture to ethical uncertainty. This mode of representation is vastly different from the typical generic conventions employed in a feature film, though Ben-Mayor’s Kapo serves as an illustrative contrast to Margarethe von Trotta’s 2012 German biographical drama Hannah Arendt, given that both films adopt the ‘courtroom setting’ as a central motif of their respective narratives.

III. Debating Judgement: Screening the Divisive Figure of Hannah Arendt

Holocaust films – particularly of the fictional, cinematic kind – have attracted a massive scholarship in line with their enormous influence on collective understandings of the event. ³⁷ The problem of judgement identified by Levi has pervaded cinematic attempts to screen the extreme situations facing ‘privileged’ figures for many decades, though a number of more recent narratives (particularly those listed above) have been found to convey varying degrees of ethical uncertainty through a questioning and reflexive mode of representation. ³⁸ Feature films that have engaged with Levi’s ‘grey zone’ in this way include Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone (2001), Audrius Juzenas’ Ghetto (2006), and Stefan Ruzowitzky’s Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters, 2007) and László Nemes’ Saul fia (Son of Saul, 2015), which have received considerable scholarly attention of late. ³⁹ The problematic narrative and aesthetic choices of Kapo, which adopts a legal framework in order to pass moral judgement, might seem to suggest that a focus on courtroom drama inherently problematises any screen depiction of the ethical dilemmas faced by Holocaust victims. However, director Margarethe von Trotta’s 2012 German biographical drama Hannah Arendt appropriates this setting in a substantially different way to explore the subject of Jewish ‘complicity’ in a more nuanced manner than has frequently been seen elsewhere.

Understandably, most Holocaust fiction films that evoke a courtroom setting are those which depict the trails of Nazi perpetrators (to date there has been no fictional treatment of the ‘Kapo Trials’). James Jordan’s study From Nuremberg to Hollywood: The Holocaust and the Courtroom in American Fictive Film provides a close analysis of many of these, including influential productions such as Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), Arthur Hiller’s The Man in the Glass Booth (1975) and Stephen Daldry’s The Reader (2008) – all of which portray the trials of actual or fictionalised persecutors at various levels of the Nazi hierarchy. ⁴⁰ Jordan aptly notes that:

Given the visibility, drama and significance of [historical] courtrooms it is perhaps unsurprising that analogous to this sequence of trials, Hollywood and American film more generally have consistently utilized the law and the dialectic of the courtroom in order to represent and engage with the Holocaust and its memory. ⁴¹

Released after Jordan’s study, Hannah Arendt is a further example of this trend, though entails significant differences. Focused on the title character’s provocative reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann and the tumultuous reception of Arendt’s ideas by the public, this film has the important additional feature of engaging with the issue of judging ‘privileged’ Jews. Further, situated within the corpus of European Holocaust cinema, Hannah Arendt resists what have become commonplace tropes of sentimentality and emotional catharsis in many American productions.

Arendt was a prominent philosopher, journalist and political thinker. Her book The Origins of Totalitarianism acknowledged the ‘total domination’ of concentration camp prisoners, which seemed to mark a moral distinction from what she called elsewhere the ‘limited freedom of decision and of action’ in the ghettos. ⁴² Arendt published her most controversial work, Eichmann in Jerusalem (originally written as a series of articles in The New Yorker), after attending the perpetrator’s trial in Israel. She posited a theory of perpetrator motivation and behaviour that hinged on what she called the ‘banality of evil’, conceptualising Eichmann as an unthinking bureaucrat and de-emphasising the role antisemitism.

Significantly, Arendt was intensely preoccupied with Kantian-influenced ideas about judgement throughout her life’s work. Seeing religious and philosophical authority as undermined in the aftermath of World War II, she deferred in her early writings to the political realm, holding that while no universal moral rules can be guaranteed – indeed, they may be inappropriate and thus unreliable – it is still possible to establish a faculty of judgement: ‘the simple fact that there are no general standards to determine our judgements unfailingly, no general rules under which to subsume the particular cases with any degree of certainty’, necessitates an attempt to think and judge without these guides. ⁴³ Arendt began a series of volumes on what she viewed as the mind’s three basic activities, ‘Thinking’, ‘Willing’ and ‘Judging’; however, after completing the first two volumes, she died of a heart attack while the unfinished first page of the ‘Judging’ manuscript lay waiting in her typewriter. ⁴⁴ She therefore never explicated judgement’s relation to the mind’s other faculties, although it is clear she considered ‘judging’ to be separate from ‘thinking’, which she regarded as liberating ‘the faculty of judgement. . . the most political of man’s mental abilities’. ⁴⁵

Beyond her critique of the unthinking Eichmann, a significant argument that emerged in Arendt’s reporting on the Nazi perpetrator’s trial was her condemnation of Judenrat leaders for exacerbating the number of Jewish deaths. At one point, she argues their actions ‘offer the most striking insight into the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society’. ⁴⁶ This and other polemical comments drew the ire of Jewish communities at the time and her judgements of the Judenräte have been strongly contested by many scholars since. ⁴⁷ Significantly, Arendt’s perspective on the Jewish councils and police have explicitly been contrasted with Levi’s ‘grey zone’ on multiple occasions. ⁴⁸ While Arendt’s characterisation of Jewish ‘complicity’ and the response it attracted form a major theme within Hannah Arendt, current writing on the film generally mention this aspect only in passing or not at all. ⁴⁹

The film opens with the arrest of Adolf Eichmann and Arendt’s instant intrigue upon reading about it in the newspaper. A German-Jewish emigrant who had escaped persecution in the early months of Nazi rule, Arendt now lives in New York working as a professor. Early scenes reveal her positive reputation among all those around her: colleague Hans Jonas (an American-Jewish philosopher and long-time friend of Arendt) openly call her a ‘genius’, while a student enthusiastically exclaims, ‘I hope you’re still teaching next term’, on hearing that she has volunteered to cover the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. ⁵⁰ Played by Barbara Sukowa, Arendt is frequently depicted in domestic settings, often on her own in prolonged, quiet scenes that show her smoking cigarettes and thinking for long periods. At other times, social gatherings of Arendt’s intellectual circle provide a venue for sustained discussion of – and often spirited debate about – various political, legal and ethical issues. The trial itself is dramatised through a substantial use of archival material from the actual event. Black-and-white footage of the panel of judges, prosecutor, testifying witnesses and Eichmann in his glass enclosure is either intercut with actors in colour playing the trial’s audience, or screened on television sets when Arendt is not attending in person. This stylistic contrast has a distancing effect on the viewer, as the more dramatic moments of the trial – such as a survivor witness fainting during his testimony – remain in the background and priority is given to the views of Arendt and other debating onlookers. A musical score serves to build tension on several occasions, though is relatively muted when compared with the emotive score of Kapo.

Crucially, the legal controversies debated within the film revolve exclusively around Eichmann, from the legitimacy of his arrest in South America by Mossad, to Arendt’s growing concerns over the ‘show trial’ nature of proceedings, to whether Eichmann should receive the death penalty. The film therefore works to maintain a clear distinction between Eichmann’s legal and moral responsibility (no matter how flawed the trial is perceived to be) and the very different question of whether Jewish council representatives are blameworthy for their forced cooperation. This is in concert with Levi’s statement in ‘The Grey Zone’ that while Nazi perpetrators were seldom sadistic monsters, to confuse persecutors ‘with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity’. ⁵¹ In one of the film’s early scenes, Arendt watches the television intently as archive footage shows a former Jewish elder claiming he and his fellow community leaders had no chance to adequately warn the population of what deportations meant, only to be interrupted by a man in the audience who screams at him for being a ‘cowardly dog’ as he is escorted from the courtroom. The narrative moves on to a series of protestations by Eichmann that he was simply following orders; nonetheless, tensions over Jewish behaviour in extremis re-emerge when Arendt completes her first article.

When three journalists at The New Yorker review Arendt’s submission, two express admiration for her ‘original’ interpretation of Eichmann, but one female journalist expresses deep concern over one aspect. She tells her colleagues that their readers will ‘have our heads for this’ as she proceeds to read from Arendt’s reflection in a sarcastic tone:

Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders. And this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth is that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery, but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four-and-a-half and six million people. ⁵²

The woman’s male colleagues silently listen as the camera alternates between their concerned expressions, before they launch into a debate. The two men take Arendt’s side: The editor argues her judgement is a minor part of the overall work, while the woman tells them ‘she’s blaming the victims’ and ‘you’d better make sure she’s got her facts straight or we’ll be needing bodyguards, for her and for us’. The debate between the journalists is left unresolved, although in the next scene the editor is shown semi-reluctantly raising the issue of the ‘description of the Jewish leaders’ with Arendt, telling her that ‘you do offer an interpretation of your own that might disturb just a bit’. When Arendt dismissively states, ‘That’s not correct’, and claims she did not attempt to judge Jewish behaviour, the editor confronts her with her own words: ‘“To a Jew, this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter in the whole dark story.” That could count as an interpretation’. Arendt curtly replies, ‘But it’s a fact’. ⁵³ The scene then moves from its sequence of close shot-reverse-shots of dialogue to a prolonged silence: Both figures are depicted in a medium shot, sitting at a table in a darkened room, separated by a window frame. The chasm between them is reinforced by the editor’s eventual sigh, which ends the scene. The aesthetic choices of this scene, absent of any musical interjection, have the effect of foregrounding Arendt’s judgement and its problematic nature rather than Jewish behaviour itself. The fact this scene is the first time a debate between characters is not resolved through some friendly form of collegial reconciliation is also significant.

Quiet contemplation is both Hannah Arendt’s key driving force and the implicit request made of its audience at many turns. The film’s self-conscious thematic interest in ‘thinking’, along with its employment of silence in the abovementioned scene and others, encourages the viewer to take part in the same process of rational and critical thought that Arendt is frequently shown engaging in. Subsequent scenes show the exhausted journalists receiving endless complaints by phone, while Arendt dismisses the criticism she has attracted as a ‘tempest in a teacup’. Several of Arendt’s friends and the film’s most sympathetic characters express concern about her vulnerability, with her partner calling her ‘naïve’. ⁵⁴ Importantly, Arendt’s take on Eichmann is portrayed as the main catalyst of the widespread outcry, and her critique of the Judenräte remains lingering in the background for some time. The subject reasserts itself when one colleague who showed great admiration for her at the beginning of the film exclaims at a public event: ‘The worst mistake was to criticize the Jews while the mass murderer was sitting there in the dock!’ ⁵⁵ The viewer is positioned to observe this scene from the perspective of the ambivalent editor who spoke with Arendt earlier. He tells the group of men: ‘You’re all treating Hannah Arendt like a suspect in a police court instead of a respected political thinker’. The film moves on to make clear that the sweeping criticism of Arendt was of a deeply personal nature and overstepped professional and ethical boundaries, and it is in the final scenes that the film borders on justifying Arendt’s judgement of ‘privileged’ Jews within its narrative.

Arendt is shown being threatened by the Israeli secret service not to release her book, disowned by an old friend for her ‘ruthlessness’ after she rushes to his deathbed in Israel, and receiving numerous strongly-worded letters, including several death threats. When her partner pleads with her not to answer the correspondence, she states adamantly: ‘I’ve hurt these people badly. I have to take that seriously’. This would seem to imply some remorse for her provocative comments on Holocaust victims, yet when she is asked to resign from her teaching position, she refuses to bow to the ‘hysterical reactions to my report’. Instead, Arendt delivers a semi-cathartic public lecture to a theatre full of students (and the men who asked her to resign). Arendt begins to speak only of Eichmann and the ‘banality of evil’ until a professor stands to confront her with ‘the most important part of the controversy’ that she is avoiding – that she has ‘blamed Jews for their own destruction’. ⁵⁶ She yells back at him:

I never blamed the Jewish people! Resistance was impossible. But perhaps there is something in between resistance and cooperation. And only in that sense do I say that maybe some of the Jewish leaders might have behaved differently. It is profoundly important to ask these questions, because the role of the Jewish leaders gives the most striking insight into the totality of the moral collapse that the Nazis caused in respectable European society! ⁵⁷

Here Arendt begins with a sentiment akin to Levi’s reflections on the ‘grey zone’ before again veering towards judgement. This long scene is positioned as a ‘redemptive’ moment for Arendt, as her speech receives loud applause from smiling students. Her conclusion that one must prioritise ‘thinking’ to avert future catastrophes implies that those who do not understand Jewish leaders as she has have not adequately thought through their behaviour.

Despite this climactic moment, the viewer is left with some space to re-consider Arendt’s perspective. She notices her friend Hans Jonas in the audience and is surprised when he criticises her firm grip on her opinions: ‘between your arrogance and your ignorance, your hopeless ignorance about Jewish affairs, you turn a court trial into a philosophy lesson. . . . And you accuse us of being accomplices to the Shoah’. ⁵⁸ The high camera angle that reveals a visibly shocked Arendt diminishes her earlier victory to a significant degree. All Arendt can do is plead with Jonas to halt his dismissal of her and he walks sorrowfully away after telling Arendt he can no longer associate with her. The film ends with Arendt continuing to be relatively isolated, eating alone in the staff cafeteria and telling her partner that she would still have written about the trial even if she could have known the scandal it would cause. Whether or not Arendt would have changed anything about what she wrote about Jewish leaders is left an open question.

IV. Conclusion

The philosopher Giorgio Agamben appropriates Levi’s writings in his call for a radical revision of how ethics is conceived in the wake of the Holocaust. Meditating somewhat abstractly on the ‘grey zone’, Agamben notes a crucial obstacle to any attempt at understanding; namely, the problem of judgement: ‘The unprecedented discovery made by Levi at Auschwitz concerns an area that is independent of every establishment of responsibility, an area in which Levi succeeded in isolating something like a new ethical element’. ⁵⁹ The paradox explored in the preceding analysis, where the inappropriateness and inevitability of judgement converge in the context of particularly sensitive historical subject matter, reveals that Levi’s ideas continue to resonate in the present day.

Holocaust film is not – as no other medium is – a transparent vehicle for representing complex motivations and actions, and the behaviour of ‘privileged’ Jews has proven immensely difficult for survivors themselves to comprehend. ⁶⁰ Screening the ethical dilemmas faced by those prisoners forced to assist the Nazis, and – in the case of the films examined here – those who attempt to understand and judge their experiences, has proven an important aspect of ongoing attempts to come to terms with the Nazi past. The conventions of expository documentaries such as Kapo have been shown to readily lend themselves to relatively clear-cut judgements of ‘privileged Jews’, whereas the fictional dramatisation and nuanced positioning of theme and character in Hannah Arendt arguably opens up more space for viewers’ contemplation on the problem of judgement. Nonetheless, moving beyond a court of law and the moral-legal paradigm necessarily associated with it is only one of many steps towards a deeper understanding of those liminal figures within Levi’s ‘grey zone’.